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If you're looking for an array that supports all protocols, look no further!
February 15, 2018

If you're looking for an array that supports all protocols, look no further!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NetApp All Flash FAS

NetApp All Flash FAS is currently being used to host our production data across all departments. It hosts our CIFS shares which are mapped as network drives for all the end users. It also hosts our entire VDI environment. It helped us tremendously by giving us the flexibility to use NFS, ISCSI and CIFS protocols as we use them all.
  • Supports CIFS, NFS, ISCSI and FC protocols. Not all flash products out in the market today support all protocols and this makes it harder for small - mid scale organizations who cannot afford multiple million dollar storage platforms.
  • Handles workloads really well. We have VDI, SQL DB, Production workloads running on it all at the same time and the array doesn't choke on latency or IOPS.
  • CDOT has come a long way and with the newer versions of CDOT, the data reduction and compression makes way for a lot more usable storage than what you pay for in RAW.
  • As always, Netapp upgrades are really painful. I wish there was an easy way of upgrading Netapp.
  • GUI is hard to use and CLI is even worse. GUI is confusing and you click all over the place before you get over the learning curve. CLI has changed from the 7-mode days and is very confusing to use. I have had scenarios where the support themselves use documentation to put in the proper commands.
  • Like any array, Netapp's CDOT has it's own bugs in the software. We learnt the hard way when one of our nodes went down and a bug prevented take over of SCSI services which resulted in an APD situation on all our ESXI hosts. Was a nightmare rebooting all the VM's and ESXI's to relieve them of the APD's. People don't pay millions towards a storage platform to go through nightmares.
  • ROI has been tremendous as it has come in handy in all the scenarios we were looking at
  • Users and admins both happy with the overall performance and management is happy that they got a good deal from reseller.
We looked at Pure, Nimble, XtremIO and NetApp. Although all the arrays did really well, the ability to support all protocols sets NetApp apart. Each vendor had its own pluses and minuses and we bought the array that best suited our business needs and budget.
It is very well suited for any organization who is trying to host network drives as it supports CIFS protocol and is very good at it. We looked into multiple products including SMB with other flash storage platforms and still went back to Netapp because it does CIFS really well. Any organization who is trying to host VDI on flash will benefit from the use of NetApp All Flash FAS as we did. Our users immediately noticed a difference in performance of their VDI bootup times and overall experience. From the admin's point of view, they noticed server reboot times to be a few seconds. Overall, this array provides a lot of IOPS, does data compression and reduction really well and is worth the investment.